Saturday, December 28, 2013

Part of the 'poverty' proganda focuses on house size. In particular, how many children have to share a bedroom.

While New Zealand's narrative is similar to the United Kingdom's, the following piece from The Scotsman provides a more optimistic slant:

Modern Scots are living in relative luxury compared with conditions 150 years ago.
Two
people were sharing every room in a home, the 1861 census shows,
compared with a current average of two rooms for every person.

The term 'relative' should be employed in both a contemporary and historic sense.

In the developed world, we are all undoubtedly richer today then ever before.

I've been intending to link to this new site and now presents the perfect opportunity.

Governments come and go with ambitious reform ideas and plans. Treasury just keeps on forecasting numbers and expenditures seemingly regardless of those policy changes. The depressing thing is, if you were going to put money on who has the most reliable crystal ball, it'd have to go on Treasury. That's what history shows anyway.

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

After Colin James drew my attention to it, I thought I'd have a closer look at what the Parliamentary Health Committee published. The title of the report is long-winded: "Inquiry into improving child health outcomes and preventing child abuse with a focus on pre-conception until three years of age", November 2013, Report of the Health Committee. It's 126 pages.

When I got to about page 70 it suddenly occurred to me that fathers were absent. So I did a search.

"Fathers" are effectively mentioned once. There is a two paragraph section titled, "Fathers and the maternity system" and an ensuing recommendation. Apart from the acknowledgement of a submission from Great Fathers Trust (that was a waste of time), that's it.

So I tried "male". Again one mention. This time relating to sterilisation.

As a society we nag on about deadbeat Dads and absentee fathers.

This report only demonstrates that fathers aren't particularly valued anyway. Any protective and positive role they play is virtually ignored.

Update

I'd rather end on a happy note. My Dad was probably the most influential person in my childhood and youth. Even today, when I need solace or advice or help he is often the first person I turn to. So my thoughts about fathers are coloured by my own experience. I wish it was one more commonly shared. Merry Christmas, especially to those Dads who are unwillingly separated from their children and finding this time of year hard.

I didn't want to blog today. But this couldn't go without comment. It's an extract from Colin James' Christmas message:

In our small, enlightened
society many tens of thousands of children go without some necessities or
nourishing food or emotional security or guidance to learn.

Through the actions of
mothers who eat badly and/or smoke, drink and take drugs before conception and
during pregnancy and/or live with a violent man and/or then don't or can't get
their children reading and counting and ready to be schooled, many of those
children are in effect imprisoned, not in a hulk but in the lesser persons they
become compared with what they might have been. Many are imprisoned in drugs,
mental illness, delinquency and crime.

Individual liberty requires individual responsibility. When individuals cease to act responsibly, when they neglect or abuse their child, they are no longer living in a state of individual liberty.

They lost - or never achieved - that status because the collective has absolved them from taking it. That is the genesis of the conditions James' describes. Will more intervention and investment by the collective return these parents to a state of individual liberty? That seems to be the advice.

The parliamentary health
committee disagrees. A report in November, chaired by National MP Paul
Hutchison and signed by all 10 MPs on the committee -- five National, three
Labour, one Green and one New Zealand First -- focused on the needs and
opportunities of the child and proposed many interventions to get parents ready
and fit and get children a good start.

That report, the most
important parliamentary report in a long time, essentially said the country
should frame policy and then make social investments on the presumption that a
child of one of us is a child of all of us and that no child deserves a bad
start.

That is a simple economic
calculation: a child who can get educated and is emotionally stable will join
the workforce, pay taxes, take a full part in society and bring up children who
do the same in turn.

It is also a calculation of
social cohesion: the more numerous the children who grow up feeling they are
fully part of society, the stronger, and probably richer, that society will be.

But as the Health Committee report notes NZ's spending on children is already high compared to other OECD countries.

So the message sounds noble but it doesn't take me past the essential problem.
You can't make people more responsible by taking responsibility off them. And in a large part, that's what the welfare state does.

Sunday, December 22, 2013

Earlier this year I came across an MSD fact sheet "Children's contact with
MSD services". The title of the paper had been given to me in advance of its publication by someone outside of the Ministry. Periodically I had been searching the MSD website for it but nothing appeared. At some point I decided to search for it on google. To my surprise it appeared at the MSD website.

(I then wrote about the flawed analysis and skewed findings here. Rodney Hide wrote about it in the NBR).

What intrigued me was that the fact sheet was un-indexed and unsearchable at the MSD website. It remains so as I write.

Your search - Children’s contact with MSD services - did not match any documents.
No pages were found containing "Children’s contact with MSD services".

Suggestions:

Make sure all words are spelled correctly.

Try different keywords.

Try more general keywords.

So I asked MSD why. They responded by saying that the fact sheet was available and providing the url. Also,

The Ministry's website is updated regularly with brochures, forms,
fact sheets, media releases, publications and reports. We endeavour to
ensure all our information is accessible (my emphasis) and if
there are any publications not available on the website that should be,
we appreciate any feedback about this.

I responded:

"I realise it is available. My question asked why it
isn't indexed. There is an important distinction. Under
'Publications and Resources' the fact sheet neither appears
under 'C' nor the year of publication. Furthermore, a search
of the site does not produce it. Therefore it is effectively
inaccessible. Why is that the case?"

Here's their latest statement:

With regard to your
question about why the “Children’s contact with MSD services”
fact sheet is not indexed on the Ministry’s website. As you
will be aware, the Ministry have a number of publications and
brochures across its various services and therefore it is not
reasonable to index all of these on the Ministry’s website.
Publications like this are available in the Publications and
Resources section of the Ministry’s website and “Children’s
contact with MSD services” is a searchable phrase through
various website search engines.

So there you go. If you just happen to hit on the right 'phrase' you will find the paper. But not if you look for it at the MSD website. It is effectively buried.

MSD does not understand the difference between 'available' and 'accessible'. Or perhaps they do.

Pageviews past week

Comments policy

About Me

Lindsay Mitchell has been researching and commenting on welfare since 2001. Many of her articles have been published in mainstream media and she has appeared on radio,tv and before select committees discussing issues relating to welfare. Lindsay is also an artist who works under commission and exhibits at Wellington, New Zealand, galleries.